With North Korea's recent ballistic missile test and the meeting on the sidelines with Vladimir Putin at the G-20 Summit, President Trump's Deputy Press Secretary told reporters about the limits the administration had imposed on coverage by the media. While on Air Force One this week, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the administration had been pretty consistent with not broadcasting what they were going to do next.
Given the difficulty of the situation with North Korea and extensive analysis by experts outside the administration over several months, there is every indication that President Trump has already had his next steps broadcast quite broadly or by not wanting to, he might have revealed that he doesn't have any.
Experts estimate damage from war with North Korea
Assuming that his next steps are war, experts analyzing the devastation that would result from taking any military action against North Korea appears to be accurate. Therefore, there would be no need to rely on the trump administration to know what would result from U.S.
and South Korea military strikes against the North. One of the scenarios being that South Korea would likely encounter thousands of incoming missiles raining down on them which not even the highly advanced THAAD missile system could stop. It's also been reported that the anti-defense missile system set up in the U.S. is also not capable of holding off a bombardment of long-range missile attacks from Pyongyang. Here is some analysis from President Trump's declared media enemy CNN.
President Trump tweeted out that they had to give diplomacy a try with North Korea through China. But a report of a planned meeting between North Korea diplomats and the U.S. earlier this year appeared to be deliberately sabotaged by the Trump administration.
So the options of sitting down and negotiating with Pyongyang have already failed and unless the Trump administration is willing to wait them out as they conduct more ballistic missile tests, there is no indication that President Trump feels there are another other options than to continue to pressure China. The issues the U.S. has with China are around them continuing to trade with the North which Trump said had almost grown by 40 percent.
China, Russia pressure U.S. to back off of N. Korea
Being that Trump is hardly a relevant source to go to for data, China reported in April which that trade with North Korea had grown by 3.7 percent. This, despite the perception that China was sending boats that were carrying coal back to the North.
During the UN Security Council meeting on Wednesday, Both China and Russia made demands of the U.S. to stop their joint exercises with South Korea in exchange to force the North to cease with their missile testing. Russian diplomats at the UN have been persistent in their differentiating views against the international consensus that someone has to rein in North Korea.
If the U.S. is suggesting something, it's typical for the Russians to go against it. It was reported that Russia denied at the UN that North Korea even tested a long-range missile. Russians instead said that it was an intermediate-range missile in order to downplay the reaction from the U.S. and other regional powers. It was during the security council emergency meeting that U.S. ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, slammed the Russian ambassador for downplaying the lethality of the missile used and repeated that the U. S. would go it alone against North Korea if they had to.